Footloose and Fancy-free Friday Book covers

Last week I talked about how much I am enjoying my photography class.  Well, I'm still enjoying it.  (Even though my last set of negs was a bugger and wouldn't yield any good prints.)

Our current assignment in photography is to photograph our fortune (pulled from a fortune cookie of course) and its opposite.

My original fortune was "Avenues of good fortune are ahead of you."

I couldn't think of anything more fortunate than getting my book published.

So, I designed my own book cover for Lodestar.  And boy did I have fun with it.  I'm only going to show you the positive side of it.  Because for the opposite, I put a different author's name on there.  (Then I had to reshoot the assignment and well, yeah.)

One of my other classes is all about the Adobe creative suite.  I love the Adobe creative suite.  It's amazing.  (Though inDesign makes my brain hurt.)  And they make it lots of fun to design things for my books.  (Take our last assignment, for example.  We had to design a movie poster.  So I designed it for Lodestar complete with my dream casting for my MC and one of his two love interests.)

I wanted to share my cover design foray with you all today since it's my blog and I can do that sort of thing.  (I'm really not this egomaniacal.  I don't know what's come over me.)


Ready for it?  I know this is completely not a marketable book cover.























Okay, so just imagine that the black bit on the left extends all the way around so that there's a background for the back copy.  And obviously my name shouldn't be as big as the title on the spine, but whatever.

I rather like the gunmetal grey bas-relief effect I put on there.  I used Photoshop to put the sword in the guy's hand and give it a different background than the ugly fence that was back there.  Then I used Illustrator to put it all together and add in the text.

Just in case you wanted to know.